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Tag: smart thermostats

  • Smart Thermostats: Honeywell Announces the Lyric Thermostat

    The smart thermostat business has held promise for quite a while now, with even companies such as Google investing heavily in the technology. Now one of the most popular thermostat makers in the world has entered its own smart thermostat into the running.

    Honeywell has announced its new Lyric thermostat, a smart thermostat with programmable capabilities. The device is being marketed as a way for consumers to save money and more accurately control the climate of their homes.

    The Lyric can be paired with a smartphone to monitor the comings and goings of a household. This “geofencing” feature uses a smartphone’s location to automatically switch off the Lyric when a house is empty or switch on when the smartphone appears to be returning. The thermostat can also provide alerts for filter changes or when a furnace need to be serviced.

    A smartphone using Honeywell’s Lyric app can adjust the thermostat manually from anywhere. The Lyric will also, of course, be fully adjustable via a dial control on the thermostat’s face.

    Honeywell also claims that the thermostat has a “Fine Tune” feature that takes into account outdoor weather (including temperature and humidity) when adjusting indoor temperatures.

    “Most people don’t have a predictable pattern to how they live their lives; why not have a thermostat that adjusts based on your real-time schedule?” said Beth Wozniak, president of Honeywell Environmental and Combustion Controls. “With the Lyric thermostat’s geofencing capability, my house returns to my preferred comfort setting when I’m within a few miles from home. Quite simply, the Lyric thermostat offers me the ability to keep my life in tune – delivering comfort when I’m home and savings when I’m gone.”

    Honeywell is pricing the Lyric at $279 – around $30 more expensive than Google’s Nest thermostat. Consumers can install the device in their homes now through contractors, or wait until sometime in August when the device is expected to hit retail stores.

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  • Home Energy Management Market to Take Off

    As technology and connectivity improves, more and more commonplace items and appliances are becoming connected. The eventuality of this trend is what tech market watchers call the “internet of things,” a term meant to convey our lives when nearly every part of them are connected in some way.

    One of the earliest manifestations of this tech will be smart homes that adapt to their dwellers’ whims. Already energy efficiency systems for houses are beginning to become smarter. Market research firm Navigant Research today released a new report predicting that the home energy management (HEM) market will continue to grow in the coming years, eventually becoming a billion-dollar industry.

    The report estimates that $512 Million was spent on HEM systems worldwide during 2013. Navigant predicts that the market will steadily rise to top $2.8 billion by the year 2020. Following this peak the firm sees the market dropping quickly back down to only $1.8 billion in revenue in 2022.

    The HEM market is, of course, heavily tied to the fledgling smart thermostat market. Navigant expects 32 million smart thermostats to have been installed worldwide by the year 2020. The recent Google acquisition of Nest is also seen as a strong sign for the coming HEM market.

    “Companies like Comcast, ADT, Verizon, and AT&T in the United States have added energy management as an option that can be bundled with home security, automation, or internet access,” said Neil Strother, senior research analyst at Navigant. “The uptake of home energy management by consumers is still relatively low, but these service providers are seeding a market that has reasonable potential over the next several years.”

  • Smart Thermostats to Become Billion-Dollar Market

    There was quite a bit of confusion surrounding Google’s recent acquisition of smart thermostat company Nest. As usual, privacy concerns about Google “spying” on people in their own homes were brought up, but an even larger question was what exactly an internet advertising company wants with a thermostat startup.

    A new report on smart thermostats could shed light on what Google’s plans for Nest are. Market research firm Navigant Research today released a report showing that the market for smart, programmable thermostats could take in over $1 billion by the end of the decade. The firm estimates that smart thermostat revenue will top $1.4 billion by 2020, far more than the estimated $86 million the industry took in during 2013.

    Navigant believes that current smart thermostats are limited by their ease-of-use and their limited energy savings. The firm believes that these hurdles will be passed in the coming years, with consumers embracing such technology. A move toward more home automation in general in the tech industry is also seen as a factor that could drive smart thermostat sales in the years to come.

    “Large retailers, including Lowe’s and The Home Depot in the United States and B&Q in Europe, have begun selling smart thermostats, signaling that sales of these devices could grow in coming years,” said Bob Lockhart, research director at Navigant. “It remains to be seen, though, whether marketing efforts on behalf of these retailers will raise the interest of a large pool of customers who are not already planning to replace an existing thermostat.”